Holy mother of God, would something just happen? The way things are going, I assume man will be living on Mars before the Cubs have a new GM.

They have been without one now for almost 3 months. Sure, we’ve only known about the vacancy for 2 months, but that is just semantics. It doesn’t change the fact that every damn thing this team does lately can be measured on a geological scale.

It all started with the sale from the Tribune. That was announced on Opening Day 2007. The housing market was booming. The Dow was soaring. Barack Obama was trailing the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton by a wide margin. iPhones hadn’t gone on sale yet. MySpace was still being used.

Granted, it’s not like Nixon was still in the White House or anything, but things move fast these days. Except for the Cubs. The rest of the world is Tony Campana and the Cubs are Hector Villanueva.

I get the feeling the Cubs have spent the last 3 months arranging GM candidates names on color-coded post-its and having a meeting everyday to decide if the order of the post-its is current as of the latest news cycle. In fact, they probably had a month long exploratory committee that’s main purpose was to determine which color post-it belonged to which candidate. Meanwhile, Todd sat in the corner playing with crayons.

The sales process took over two years, and now it has taken almost two years for Ricketts to start disassembling the Tribune structure that was left behind. Everybody, and I mean EVERYBODY who followed this team in even the slightest way over the years had come to the basic conclusion that Hendry had run his course, that Crane Kenney was a retarded greasy weasel in a suit, and the best thing about the sale is that the Cubs could start fresh. But not the uber-fan Tom Ricketts. Oh no. He needed to see the team go on a 100-game losing pace before acknowledging that maybe the Cubs weren’t the contenders he had supposedly bought with Dad’s money.

So did he make any sweeping changes then? No, he stuck with his new frat buddy in the President’s job, and let his general manager hire his 3rd manager in 6 years. Nobody let’s their GM hire three different managers. After the 2nd manager, it is usually understood that maybe the on-field manager isn’t the problem. So the Cubs parted ways with a team legend, which in and of itself isn’t the worst thing in the world for his sake, but nevertheless completely unnecessary.

Finally when his 30-year journeyman manager couldn’t wrangle a winning record out of the flotsam and jetsam of the organization, Ricketts came to the conclusion that Jim Hendry was not going to be able to untangle the mess he had made with Zell’s money under the financial restrictions they now found themselves. It’s not like they had much choice after amassing so much debt that they violated MLB policy. Money wasn’t going to fix it this time, or at leat, there wasn’t any money available to fix it.

So Ricketts secretly pulled the trigger. Even if they didn’t have a short list made of the colored post-its on July 22nd, when they actually fired Hendry, they could have easily had it together a month later when they announced it to the press. So what’s the hold-up?

Oh our top candidates work for teams that are still vying for the playoffs. Well, Theo’s plate suddenly got a lot lighter at the end of September. That was almost 2 weeks ago. Hell, Friedman hasn’t had much going on since Tuesday night, and now Cashman is done.

Can we finally have a new GM already since every single presumable candidate is done with their season? Can we at least know whether the Cubs have talked to anybody?

No.

There will almost assuredly not be any news this weekend because of Yom Kippur and the Cubs wouldn’t want to make an announcement about their prized candidate who happens to be Jewish during a Jewish high holiday. So now even God himself is slowing the Cubs down.

Of course, it will turn out that Theo has merely been using the Cubs as leverage to gain more power and money in his current job, so the Cubs will have to go back to their post-its to figure how who they should call next.

Meanwhile on the other side of town, Kenny Williams needed a manager, so he threw a dart out his window and happened to hit Robin Ventura who was in town for a card signing. If he had thrown it 10 seconds sooner, it would have hit Milt Johnson, CTA bus driver extraordinaire (who was passing the Cell on his way home from work) and he would have been the new White Sox manager.

I’m not saying Kenny’s way is better, but at least it is something.

If the Cubs expect us to wait on Ricketts for two years to get his shit together just to get STARTED on the process of building a competent organization, I can’t imagine how long he will be content to take our money in ever increasing sums as the process occurs. We could be on the forefront of a bold new 30 year plan to win a World Series.

It’s getting to the point where I wish Ricketts would just use the dart-throwing method. I noticed Ned Coletti has been hanging around outside Ricketts’ office window just in case.